Aug 12, 2012

The whole building is asleep. Two engineers toil through the night building the quadrocopter. Hunger sets in and they decide to make some food. The kitchen cupboards are full. The eggs are plenty. There is bread . There is butter. There is cheese and there is Maggi. The only problem there is no gas lighter or matchstick that can be used to ignite the stove.

While in Manipal i have on occasion used the heat from my laptop to heat burgers (Only possible while rendering or playing a intensive video game). However in this case we (Mudit Gupta and me) needed fire to get the job done.

If you ever find your self in a similar situation the following things don't work:

Trying to burn a resistor on the stove.

Trying to blow up a capacitor above the stove.

Trying to charge and then discharge a 470uF capacitor over the stove.

Trying to charge and then discharge a 2200uF capacitor over the stove.

Trying to grind a drill bit to a piece of metal to generate sparks over the stove.

Trying to short a 6V lead acid battery over the stove.

Using the heating coil from a Hot Glue Gun (What the hell were we thinking).

Using a soldering iron.

What does work is shorting a 24V transformer to create sparks to ignite the LPG gas.

I already own a cordless drill which has come quite handy in all the projects I have done ever since I bought it. I thought of increasing my collection and so decided to buy a Dremel tool (7700-30). This is a 7.2v cordless rotatory tool.

Step 2: Charge the battery for your Dremel. Technically this should be step 1.

Step 3: Attach cutting wheel to the Dremel.

Step 4: Slice and Dice away

Step 5: Realize it did not work because the cutting wheel size was too small. Plan to order a bigger cutting wheel.

Step 6: Use a knife. Eat Pizza.

Anyway after that failed I decided to come-up with something different to show the power of the Dremel.

I have recently purchased a dart board and have been paying around with it quite a lot due to which one or two of the darts had become quite blunt so I decided to sharpen them. My flatmate who is a photography enthusiast (More like a photography maniac) decided to click some high exposure photographs of the same.

There have not been any updates from my side on the quadrocopter for the past 6 months. This is partly because i was working on other stuff but mainly because i got lazy (really really lazy). So one fine day about 2 weeks ago i decided that i have to finish this project. I ordered a quadrocopter control board as i was getting one at a very reasonable price (details later) and i did not have the time to build one for myself (as earlier planned - i might do this sometime later). I did make some changes to the design changes.

Firstly this time i went for an entirely wood construction instead of the aluminium and acrylic combination(what the hell was i thinking??). There are a few reasons for this. It is easier to work with than aluminium. Wood reduces the vibrations of the motors. Wood is cheaper (was able to get material for building 4 quadrocopter for 280 bucks !!!!) and most importantly it available near my house unlike aluminum rods (laziness FTW).

Secondly i purchased some matching clockwise and anti-clockwise propellers hence i will not have to work at compensating for the angular momentum by tilting the motors.

Finally i decided to do away with the nuts and bolts that hold the main structure and go for screws. This was easier as i was going for wood instead of aluminium. This also helped reduce the weight.

I also used a lot of bullet connectors while building the model and they require a lot of soldering (which im not very good at - mainly because i keep on burning my finger and at times my eyebrows) so i decided to make a bullet connector soldering stand. I was later told by my friend Mudit Gupta that people have already though of this.So i looked it up and people had indeed thought of this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnldHRtjre8 (There goes my patent). Anyway here is my attempt:

Jan 10, 2012

For my 50th blog post i decided to post videos of the crash of the Pearl EPO Glider 800. The crash happened on our first try on the 18th of December. I would have posted the videos on that date but we had recorded the videos using a sony handycam and it took some time to extract the videos (I hate sony handycams and their non standard USB's and Memory Cards). Anyway i did manage to get the videos and here they are. Enjoy

First Try
Second Try

Ill fix it up and have it up as soon as i have some free time.In the mean while enjoy he pics of the broken plane: